Elements of electronic documents can have conditional formatting, meaning that one or more properties of the elements have values that are determined based on the position of the elements within the document, or by reference to other elements. When copying and pasting such elements between applications, problems may arise if the source and destination applications determine values for these conditionally formatted properties in different manners. In particular, if the source application supports conditional formatting for a property but the destination application does not, the conditional formatting may be lost after pasting.